Monster Hunter Wilds PC Technical Issues: A Disaster

Capcom's latest release has been making waves by securing the 6th spot among Steam's most-played titles, yet it's facing significant backlash from the gaming community due to its technical shortcomings. Digital Foundry's in-depth analysis of the PC version has shed light on the game's numerous issues, drawing disappointing conclusions about its performance.

One of the major problems highlighted is the lengthy shader pre-compilation process, which takes approximately 9 minutes on a system equipped with a 9800X3D processor and over 30 minutes on a Ryzen 3600. Additionally, the texture quality remains substandard even when set to "High" graphics settings. On a PC with an RTX 4060, configured to "High" settings at 1440p resolution with balanced DLSS, users experience significant frame time spikes. Even with a more powerful RTX 4070 boasting 12 GB of memory, the textures appear notably poor.

For those with GPUs featuring 8 GB of memory, Digital Foundry recommends reducing the texture quality to "Medium" to alleviate stuttering and frame time spikes. However, this compromise still results in unsatisfactory visual quality. Rapid camera movements continue to cause noticeable spikes, though these are less severe with slower movements. Even with low-quality textures, the frame time issues persist.

Alex Battaglia from Digital Foundry points out that the core issue stems from data streaming, which places an excessive load on the GPU during decompression. This is particularly detrimental for budget graphics cards, leading to sharp frame time spikes. Consequently, Battaglia advises against purchasing the game for those with 8 GB GPUs and expresses caution even for users with more powerful setups like the RTX 4070.

The game's performance is particularly dismal on Intel GPUs. The Arc 770, for instance, only manages to deliver 15–20 frames per second, alongside missing textures and other visual artifacts. While high-performance systems can mitigate some of these issues, the game still struggles to run smoothly. At present, finding optimized settings is nearly impossible without sacrificing significant visual quality.